IIt’s been a busy fall for Grace Eliz­a­beth. The model has just re­turned to New York City af­ter walk­ing the run­ways in Mi­lan and Paris. She was hop­ing to en­joy some down­time, but her break will be short-lived. With the an­nual Vic­to­ria’s Se­cret Fash­ion Show less than a month away, she has yet an­other cat­walk to con­quer, and that re­quires get­ting into hard-core shape.

This time of year, says Eliz­a­beth ( her last name is Cabe, though she sticks to her mid­dle moniker pro­fes­sion­ally), “I ramp up my ex­er­cise rou­tine, which means box­ing five days a week and jump­ing rope in the morn­ing.” And then there’s the metic­u­lous beauty reg­i­men: “Fa­cials, teeth whiten­ing, hair masks—at the end of the day, it’s all about the hair.”

Of course, Eliz­a­beth’s suc­cess stems from more than a per­fect coif. Since catch­ing her first big break as the 2016 Guess Girl, the now 21-year-old has ex­hib­ited a chameleonic beauty that can shift from sweet girl next door one mo­ment to strik­ing glama­zon the next.

In­flu­en­tial stylist Katie Grand, who cast Eliz­a­beth as an ex­clu­sive in Miu Miu’s fall 2016 show, was an early sup­porter. “She re­ally took a chance on me,” Eliz­a­beth re­mem­bers. Her prior run­way ex­pe­ri­ence? Prom and bridal shows at her lo­cal mall in Lake City, Fla., where, she ad­mits, “I must have been the youngest bride up there.” Post–miu Miu, how­ever, con­tracts with Vic­to­ria’s Se­cret and Estée Lauder soon be­gan to fil­ter in, and last spring she re­ally hit the big leagues when she was cho­sen by Karl Lager­feld to ap­pear in Chanel’s spring 2018 cam­paign.

All of this still feels very new to the ris­ing star, who didn’t have much ex­po­sure to or con­cern with high-end fash­ion as a kid. “Our big­gest stores were T. J. Maxx and Jcpenney,” she says. “I wore a T-shirt and jeans ev­ery­where.”

Eliz­a­beth has since come to ap­pre­ci­ate buzzier brands such as Off-white and Vete­ments, but her in­ter­ests ex­tend beyond her wardrobe. A lover of “fried Oreos, fried chicken, fried ev­ery­thing,” she likes to spend time in the kitchen cre­at­ing cleaned-up ver­sions of com­fort-food sta­ples, like baked broc­coli tater tots and pro­tein-packed brown­ies. She’s also study­ing nu­tri­tion through an on­line pro­gram to be­come a li­censed di­eti­tian.

But for now Eliz­a­beth is more oc­cu­pied with where mod­el­ing can take her. “I think about six months into this job I knew I wanted to make a ca­reer of it,” she says. “And here I am, four years later, liv­ing it up!” Q